The other two or right, need more information. But your script is showing the content because your substr's are erasing the <img src=" tag before an image. You're going to have to get more involved to either remove image tags, crop the text, then reinsert image tags, or just take images out altogether. My guess is you are trying to make a featured article type thing that only shows a portion of the whole listing. If that's the case, I would remove images altogether. You're getting into an area that becomes very complicated though, as you'll have to determine if any HTML tags are open or not. The easiest way is to pull all HTML tags out of the content using a regular expression.